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Comment Re: The Reason (Score 2) 79

Y'know, I did pay for it. It's been offered to the alumni of my alma mater, and about the only thing tangible (outside a worthless piece of paper) that I received. I really don't want all the extra crap that's offered, but I'm more than happy to use the service they offered in perpetuity. Also, kinda pissed off they decided 'in perpetuity' doesn't mean what they meant when they said.

Comment Re:Great idea! (Score 2) 206

There's a better solution. Find the guy who bikes to work every day. Offer him half the 'incentive' to wear your shackle next to his own. Or .. figure out a way to mimic the data input for the shackle, and have it run 24-7. The insurance company will love you! You might want to invest in another shackle that looks the same, just in case their gestappo walks the halls looking for the insolent.

Submission + - LHC Restarts High-Energy Quest for Exotic Physics (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: It’s official: After a long 27 month hiatus for upgrades and a 2 month restart, the world’s largest particle accelerator is back in the particle collision business. As of 10:40 a.m. CET (5:40 a.m. ET), the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was running at record-breaking energies and collecting science data. Physicists now expect the particle collider to run non-stop for the next 3 years. We are in a new era of high-energy particle physics where, for the first time, we don’t exactly know what we’ll find. “With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning,” said CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry in a press release. “It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all of the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen.”

Submission + - Mars One Applicant Numbers Inflated

jklovanc writes: Mars One has admitted that they wildly inflated the number of completed applications. While they reported over 200,000 applications the number of completed applications was actually 4,227. It is apparent that they do not have the public support the want us to think they do.

Submission + - Malware Creators Use Paid Apple Program To Bypass iOS Security (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: One of the selling points iOS is that apps can only be downloaded via the App Store, which vets them for malware, thus creating a very safe environment. There is a way to bypass those security checks, though: pay $299 to sign up for the iOS Developer Enterprise Program. The program is meant for companies that want to distribute custom in-house apps to their employees, but Japanese fraudsters are now using it to get fraudware onto unsuspecting users' phones.

Submission + - Tesla co-founder plans to electrify delivery and garbage trucks (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ian Wright co-founder of electric car manufacturer Tesla is proposing to convert noisy and gas-guzzling trucks to electric versions with his latest venture Wrightspeed. The new company will sell electric powertrains to commercial vehicle suppliers to be installed on medium to heavy-duty trucks. For now Wrightspeed will be installing its powertrains on 25 FedEx delivery vehicles, as well as 17 garbage trucks owned by waste management firm Ratto Group.The add-on powertrain units cost between $150,000 — $20,000 to install, contain an electric engine, a battery system and an on-board power generator. The generator can run on either diesel or natural gas and recharges the battery when it runs low. Wright added that fleet owners in California are extremely interested in converting their vehicles to electric models, under pressure from strict regional emissions standards.

Submission + - Fallout 4 Announced (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After teasing gamers with a countdown timer yesterday, Bethesda Softworks has now announced Fallout 4 for PCs, the Xbox One, and the PS4. They've also released an official trailer. The game will be set in post-apocalyptic Boston, and the player character will apparently be accompanied on his adventures by a dog. The Guardian has a post cataloging the features they're hoping will be improved from previous games in the series: "The combat system in the last two Fallout games was not universally adored. It often felt you were shooting wildly and blindly, biding time before you could use the the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting (VAT) system, which allows players to focus in on specific parts of enemies with a percentage chance of hitting them. ... Well-written, hand-crafted quests are going to be vitally important. The Radiant Quest system used in Skyrim sounds brilliant on paper: infinite quests, randomly generated and a little different each time. But the reality was a lot of fetch quests in similar looking caves. Bethesda may be tempted to bring that system across to Fallout 4, but there’s an argument for abandoning dynamic quests altogether and opting for a smaller range of authored challenges."

Submission + - Microsoft Hasn't Given Up On The Non-Smart Phones It Inherited From Nokia

jfruh writes: Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's handset business was mostly focused on gaining a hardware line that ran the company's Windows Phone OS; but in the process, Microsoft also gained ownership of some model lines that are classified as "feature phones" and some that are straight up dumb, and they're still coming out with new models, confusingly still bearing the "Nokia" brand. The $20 Nokia 105 as billed as "long-lasting backup device" and comes with an FM radio, while the $30 Nokia 215 is "Internet-ready" and comes with Facebook and Twitter apps.

Comment Re:'Hidden city' explanation (Score 2) 126

I can conceive of at least two reasons that the airline might not like this practice:

First, they get really bad press by leaving people stranded in the middle of no-where. In the case of people intentionally ducking the last leg, that leaves the airline in a quandry - do they blow their ontime percentages by waiting for the person and earn bad press, or do they leave the person in the middle of no-where and risk the bad press?

Second, moreso than how much they can price gouge the public, flying to hidden cities starts to screw with things such as forecasting, government tracking, and load calculations.

Would it not be awesome sometime in the next couple years before this practice dies off to hear about an airplane taking off empty because nobody wanted to take the last leg?

Incidentally, I'd like to ask how many more years we have to be subjected to the lesson on how to buckle our seatbelts. Seatbelts have only been mandatory in ground transport since 1964, y'know. Sure, airline seatbelts operate slightly differently to enable others to extricate people in emergencies, but still.

Comment Re:ad blocker? (Score 1) 358

The ethical choice I make has to be weighed against the ethical choice of offering a "free" service in exchange for obtaining the metadata of every person connected to a one or a zero. At the end of the day, my own integrity means a lot more than however much "They" might choose to make off my expense. Am I worried about that choice? Excellent question.

Comment Real Estate savings (Score 1) 12

We also wanted to take a moment and talk more about yesterday's changes. This is not a full redesign â" far from it. We got rid of the left-hand nav bar because it just wasn't getting used very much. One of the biggest pieces of feedback from the Beta test was that the community didn't want us to waste screen real estate. The left-hand nav bar wasted a lot, particularly on smaller browser widths. Aside from gaining more space on the page, all the comments and stories are the same as before. The most noticeable change was to the header. We didn't want to take away navigation functionality altogether, so we put it there, and made the header look and scale a bit better. We're not done working on it, and we're cleaning up the places in which it breaks.

I think one of the biggest fallacies that developers make is forgetting that vertical real estate is far more precious than horizontal real estate. Even now on a 27" screen, I've got two inches of vertical real estate eaten up by browser menus, tabs, and headers. I've got perhaps ten inches of horizontal real estate that serves no purpose other than to brighten my room. Needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of the changes, but I understand you have a larger market to serve. I am obviously not part of that market, and that's why these changes make me sad - this website used to provide me relevant information in my field that I used on a regular basis. Now it just lets me know that I am not relevant, and that slashdot isn't capable of providing useful news. You're a Crossfire or The View, when you used to be the Daily Show.

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